Life evolved to live within limits. It’s a delicate balance. Humans need oxygen, but too much can kill us. Plants need nitrogen, but excess nitrogen harms them and pollutes rivers, lakes and oceans. Ecosystems are complex. Our health and survival depend on intricate interactions that ensure we get the right amounts of clean air, water, food from productive soils and energy from the sun.

Right. Because the planet has totally been stable within those limits for the last 4.5 billion years.

Climate change deniers either willfully ignore or fail to understand this complexity—as shown in their simplistic argument that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a beneficial gas that helps plants grow and is therefore good for humans.

Industry propagandist Tom Harris of the misnamed International Climate Science Coalition writes, “Grade school students know CO2 is not pollution; it is aerial fertilizer.” He adds, “Increasing CO2 levels pose no direct hazard to human health.”

The unscientific Heartland Institute-ICSC study he references claims, against all evidence, “Carbon dioxide has not caused weather to become more extreme, polar ice and sea ice to melt or sea level rise to accelerate.”

Except, the weather hasn’t gotten more extreme, polar and sea ice typically melt during a Holocene warm period, and sea rise has not accelerated. Suzuki goes on to describe real science, which apparently is making prognostications of future doom by reading tea leaves creating computer models, before ending with

Recently, 375 U.S. National Academy of Sciences members, including 30 Nobel laureates, published an open letter stating:

“We are certain beyond a reasonable doubt … that the problem of human-caused climate change is real, serious, and immediate, and that this problem poses significant risks: to our ability to thrive and build a better future, to national security, to human health and food production, and to the interconnected web of living systems.”

The evidence is clear and overwhelming: Rapid increases in CO2 emissions are not beneficial. It’s past time we started conserving energy and shifting to cleaner sources.